Dominance of Apple and Google’s app stores impacting competition and consumers

I got stuck in a bureaucratic loop because an OCR reader interpreted a 0 as an 8. The fact that the automated process changed status and started throwing more forms at me, even though none it makes sense in context. Just because it was programmed that way. I still get them. Filling in forms with 0's is easier than dealing with people who insist I should be getting them in the first place (one person worked out what had happened, but transferred me to another department to get it fixed where I inevitably had the internal phone system fail and hang up on me. The horrible hold music/talk experience where they tell you how wonderful everything is just makes me loathe to attempt it again.

These things should happen less when human judgement is involved rather than cause-effect programming.

You may be right though - I can't speak for many overseas systems.

I did also get stuck in the UK tax system. They were sending me threatening letters, ironically I had to fill in multiple years worth of forms to escape the system even though I was in another country, and then they eventually worked out they owed me money.

Then there were the server failures due to load, for a specific online petition. Noone cared, but it was basically due to using old MS technology called Webforms which creates gargantuan data blobs per user/session called ViewState, which ran the servers out of memory. I think the online census submissions process had a similar issue too.

I do agree its nice to deal with these things from home rather than queue in some official building somewhere though.

Maybe I just have a natural tendency to attract flies to bypewriters or something. Maybe I'm bitter because I've built entire sites for the government only for them to throw the lot away once it was done, because the site might make them look bad.

I'm just very aware of the downsides of over-automation. If you're a valid case, but the existing system doesn't cater to you, then you become the problem rather than the system being the problem.

Anyway, I still think its awesome that the ACCC noticed this entanglement and brought it to peoples attention, and are one of the few indepedent bodies left that have some teeth.

What you mean is that you do want app developers to feel network-effect pressure from the huge Apple platform which has those privacy and security requirements. Which you still have as long as a large number of people feel the same and refuse to install apps outside of Apple's store.

It may even benefit you for Apple to have less, but still some, leverage. For example, a third party store might start offering a BitTorrent client for iOS, which Apple only prohibits for bad reasons that don't help you. Then the availability of the apps in another store might convince Apple to allow well-behaved BitTorrent clients in their store to prevent you from switching (since their reasons for prohibiting it are bad). Then you get a selection of vetted clients when you currently have none.

Likewise, if there were other stores then there would be no reason for them to continue their otherwise-useless prohibition on emulators or virtualization.

Meanwhile you could still install all of your apps from their store and they would plausibly still have enough leverage to keep them well-behaved, just not enough to prohibit well-behaved things that you actually want if it's easier to get them some other way.

> Let's say I did like Facebook, or at least tolerated it because all my family was on it, and chose to use it only on iOS specifically because it was relatively secure and limited their snooping somewhat. Your scenario is a strictly worse situation for me. I was using it and was OK with the situation, now I have to either risk more snooping or drop it. That's not better.

What we're after here is a situation where the combination (you, Apple) has enough leverage to cause Facebook to provide an app that isn't ruinously bad on privacy. It's not clear that we're there even now -- Facebook has a huge network effect and basically the only reason Facebook is an app and not a web page is so it can suck up more of your personal information -- but suppose we were. Apple's leverage relative to Facebook is doing you some good.

The answer is then to make sure your leverage against Facebook is sufficient to keep them honest. This could imply some antitrust action against Facebook, e.g. so that you can use an app not written by Facebook to contact your family who uses Facebook, and then choose one willing to meet Apple's standards even if Facebook itself won't. So it's still possible to solve problems like this, to the extent that they exist, through other means.

So you often see things that are highly anti-freedom, anti-democratic and ultimately anti-consumer come out as a result of its actions. The recent forced negotiation of Google/Facebook with news publishers is an example of this where they have no problem compromising completely fundamental aspects of the internet (the freedom to link to somebody else's intellectual property without fear) to achieve some dot point in their bureaucratic consumer-focused mandate (ensure consumers have access to a diversity of news).

But what democratic countries are mandating the use of covid apps?